Death Of A Diva

by Derek Farrell

  Aubrey snorted. “Breakdown? Darling boy, she plucked herself like a fucking chicken. Live. On stage at the Albert Hall. She was batshit crazy. This made Britney’s breakdown look like a touch of the vapours. The woman went mental. Wonderfully, fabulously, mental. And if the story had ended there, it would have been Judy, Janis, Marilyn and all the other dead junkie divas rolled into one. But she got better. And worse...”

  “She was willing to play any shitty old boozer going,” I finished, feeling a pit of dread opening up in my stomach.

  “Exactly. Which would not have done a lot to burnish her reputation. Let’s face it: Who’d remember Marilyn if she’d ended up doing panto in Hull? But because Lyra died before the image – the reputation – could be made too prosaic, well, Morgan Foster is in possession of a back catalogue with an earning potential unsullied by his wife having played The Dog & Duck in Clapham. She died at a good time, too – disco’s coming back with a vengeance. Shame we can’t say the same about Lyra.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Down there, just behind Big Ben,” Nick pointed at a dark cluster of buildings far below us.

  “Ooh, I’m impressed,” I said, trying to make out just how big the family pile was. “A rich kid from Westminster.”

  He laughed. “It’s a block of council flats. We moved to Acton when I was two.”

  “But you were still born within the sound of Big Ben,” I answered, joining in his laughter, “Which makes you officially a Posho.”

  “Isn’t that a Cockney?” he asked.

  “No, I’m fairly sure being born within the sound of Big Ben doesn’t make you a Cockney.”

  “You have a cute smile,” he said, immediately removing the grin from my mug. “And a great poker face”

  “Well,” I said, “tonight, I have something to smile about. I mean, it’s not every day I get taken out for a picnic in a bubble floating over London.

  Nick smiled, dipped into a bag at his side, produced two hot dogs and offered one to me. I accepted it with one hand and gestured around with the other. “I mean, when you said we’d eat somewhere after midnight on a Sunday night, I sort of thought some burger van somewhere and a ride home in your squad car. But this...”

  Nick had arranged for a cousin of his to let us into a pod on the London eye, turn the wheel halfway round so we were suspended four hundred feet above the ground below, stop the wheel and turn out the lights.

  Below us the frost-rimed city twinkled; the sparse traffic whooshing by on the embankment in silent blurs of light and suddenly I felt very serious.

  “What do you want, Mr Detective Constable Nick Fisher?”

  “To have dinner with you,” he answered.

  “That’s all?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “That’ll do for now,” he answered, sitting next to me on the bench. “I don’t – despite what you may think – do this very often.”

  “I never said you did,” I retorted; “it’s just, well...”

  And before I knew what was happening, I’d told him about Robert. “So you see,” I finished, “I don’t, well, I don’t handle this sort of thing very well. With Robert the grand gestures were always because he wanted to do it anyway, or because he was guilty about something.”

  “So anyone who does something nice, just because, has to have an ulterior motive?”

  Moments passed, our breaths coming in tiny clouds that dissipated in the cold moonlight. At length, he spoke: “So how did it feel? Walking in on him like that?”

  I was silent for a moment, staring into the distance, past the ghostly hulk of Battersea Power Station, on into the velvet dark night. How did it feel?

  “Up till then I thought that Robert loved me. Then, when I looked into his eyes, all I saw was impatience. I was getting in the way of him getting on with having a good time. And I knew. He never loved me like I loved him. So, that’s what it felt like: like the one thing I was most positive about in the whole world – the centre of my certainty – was gone. And if I was so totally wrong about that, well, what about the rest of the world? What else was I wrong about?”

  “You bounced back,” he murmured.

  “Resilient stock,” I smiled. “Mind you, I still harbour fantasies of setting fire to the house with the two of them in it.”

  “Please don’t. I’d hate to have to arrest you.”

  “Again.”

  “You were never arrested. You were – helping us with our enquiries.”

  “I don’t think I was much help.”

  “Oh you helped me.”

  “I didn’t help myself, though, did I? Half the world still thinks I’m a mad strangler, the Marq is turning into a stop on the ‘Murder sites of London’ pub crawl and I’m running out of chances.”

  “You deserve better, you know, than all of this.”

  I laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, mate, if we all got what we deserve, the world would be a very different place.” I sighed. “It’ll pass.”

  It was now or never, I decided, so I asked: “Am I still in the frame for Lyra, or has Reid found some other mug to pin it on?”

  Nick snorted, “Reid’s a throwback, but he’s really not a hundred per cent pig, you know; he’s a solid copper and he’ll get there in the end.”

  “I may not have the time to spare.”

  “There is one suspect he hasn’t looked at yet: Falzone.”

  “What?” I frowned, puzzled.

  “Well, you’re running the Marq, but we both know – regardless of whose name is over the door – who’s really running that place. If Chopper heard that Lyra was about to take a hike he might have decided to teach her a lesson.”

  I stared over Nick’s shoulder at the illuminated face of Big Ben as one-thirty rang out. Underneath us, the embankment was empty, the river a vast dark expanse of nothing. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Chopper doesn’t strike me as the sort to strangle a singer just cos she won’t perform.”

  “You know him that well?”

  “Not that well,” I said warily.

  “But you’re running the pub for him.”

  “We’ve never actually met.” I didn’t know why I was lying; only that the conversation had suddenly – almost imperceptibly – shifted into an area I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

  “Well, let’s hope you never do. A nasty piece of work, is Mr Falzone. Now, before it gets cold,” he stepped to the bag, withdrawing a tin foil box and carefully peeling back the lid, “home-made bread and butter pudding with real custard. And yours,” he presented a spoon to me, “is the honour of the first mouthful.”

  We sat on the floor of the pod, the metropolis spread below our feet and I dug the spoon into the pudding.

  It was heavenly and I made the requisite noises, before handing the spoon to Nick.

  I stared out of the pod in the direction of the flats on the Old Kent Road where I’d been born and raised and, glancing back at the estate where Nick had been born, I marvelled at how close they were. If he’d stayed, we might have met before Robert, before Lyra and Chopper and before everything was poisoned with doubt and suspicion.

  A moment passed and his finger bushed gently along my jaw bone. “Hey you,” he said, “penny for them?”

  I sighed. “Ever wish you could wipe out everything and start again?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve just done?”

  “And ended up with a whole new pile of shit.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a pile of shit, Danny. You’ve got friends. You’ve got me.”

  I looked at him, sitting on the floor, his fringe falling over one eye, the blue-green moonlight bathing his features, making his eyes seem even more catlike than ever.

  And what good is that? I wanted to ask him. Everything I touch turns to waste, so what’s the point of having good things or good people in my life if all that’s going to happen is that I poison them?

  But I didn’t. Instead, I kissed him gently on the lips and turned so th
at my back was resting against his shoulder, my face turned away from him.

  His voice came from the darkness, from what seemed like a million miles away. “I know you’re lying, Danny. I know you’re a lot closer to Falzone than you want to admit. But you know what? That’s OK; it doesn’t matter. You asked me what I want. Well, all I want is this: to be your friend. To be here for you, whatever happens.”

  I shifted my gaze and everywhere it fell, the city – bathed in either a steel-blue moonlight or the yellow halo of artificial street lighting – seemed utterly uninhabited. For a moment I fantasised that, whilst we’d been having our dinner, some mysterious calamity had wiped out the population of London and with it all my troubles. Then, in the distance, I saw the tiny blue pinpricks of a cop car flicker on and, a second later, though it might have been my imagination, the siren sound drifted tinnily to bounce around inside the glass bubble.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Have fun, kids!” My dad waved cheerily at us as he turned the cab in an illegal u-turn and sped off into the distance.

  Caz unbuttoned her overcoat, undid the top three buttons on her tight and rather sheer silk blouse, and almost absent-mindedly shunted what she often referred to as the girls into a far more prominent role than they’d held in my father’s presence, “Your dad does know we’re hunting a murderer, doesn’t he?”

  I waved guiltily at the receding cab and turned my attention to Lady Caroline, who had now applied a thick coat of Strumpet Scarlet lippie and was fluffing her blonde locks into what can only be described as a bouffant. “Not really,” I admitted. “Caz: what the fuck are you doing?”

  “Puttin’ the goods on show,” she answered, spraying enough Chanel No. 5 to take care of a herd of polar bears and a few miles of the ice caps.

  “For Morgan Foster?” I goggled.

  Caz sighed, replaced the lipstick in her handbag, withdrew two miniatures of Chivas Regal, handed me one, downed the other (without disturbing so much as a smidgen of her makeup), dumped the two empties back into the bag and fixed me with her most patronising smile.

  “Dear boy; how, on earth, have you made it to forty?”

  “I’m thirty-five,” I protested through gritted teeth.

  “Whatever. How on earth did you ever survive so long with such naiveté intact? It’s a gift, really; one I wish I had. Haven’t you ever read a Mary Higgins Clark? Or seen an episode of Law & Order? Everyone knows that, when visiting her chief suspect, the girl detective should always slut-it-up so as to put him off guard. Make him think he stands a chance.”

  I stared open mouthed at her.

  “Do close that, sweetie; I know you have all your chromosomes.”

  “Caz! He’s just lost his wife! The woman’s not even buried yet.”

  “Oh sweetheart; these facts would be heart rending if he hadn’t throttled the old cow with his bare hands.”

  “You can’t prove that,” I protested.

  “You know,” she said, slinging the bag over one shoulder and hoiking the girls back into position, “you’re absolutely right. But with these babies on the case, it’s only a matter of time. So,” she fixed me with her sternest glare, “you good with the backstory?”

  “Backstory? Christ, what is this? Hart to Hart?”

  “Danny,” this said in the tone of one of her governesses.

  I sighed. “We ask for Jenny and go from there. You sure she’s not going to be in?”

  “Positive. She stayed over at Dom’s last night; called me to tell me how awful she feels about Lyra. I told her: guilt is a useless emotion, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Interesting,” I murmured.

  “I know. It never fails to amaze me how people can convince themselves that someone they hated in life couldn’t have been all bad; I mean, nobody’s all bad, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that whatever you hated about them in life didn’t just evaporate as soon as they were deceased.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” I said, but by then we were stood in front of the firmly barred gates, staring up a long driveway at the distant bulk of Lyra’s mansion. I frowned again at the oddity I’d just noticed and was just about to point it out to Caz, when she pressed a button set into the wall, spoke a few words to a tinny-voiced Morgan and the gates swung open.

  Morgan was a changed man from the well-groomed one that had been at the Marq less than a week ago. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved since Lyra’s death and was wearing a grubby t-shirt. His jeans hung baggily and he appeared to have lost two stone in the past five days.

  He stood blinking out at us and it seemed to take several moments for him to focus on us, and several more before he remembered who we were.

  “Caroline,” his face lifted in recognition, though the weak smile seemed like something being faxed in from far away, “how nice. Um,” he turned to me and his eyes hardened slightly before he blinked and replaced the distant smile.

  “Morgan,” I held my hand out, “I never got the chance to express my condolences.” He looked at my extended mitt and made no attempt to reach for it.

  “We came to see Jenny,” Caz announced, not so subtly shifting her weight so that her barely-secret weapons hoved into view like the coastline of a long awaited paradise isle.

  “Jenny?” Morgan frowned and I dropped my hand. “She’s not here.”

  “Oh?” Caz moued, “she said she’d meet us here this morning, I’m sure. She wanted to get a tribute for Lyra and I said I’d help her pick something out. Such a tragedy...”

  “Yes,” Foster suddenly realised that we were all still standing on the doorstep and, as if waking from a trance, stepped aside, “I suppose you’d better come in. But I was just going out, so you won’t be able to stay long.”

  This was clearly a lie; he was barefoot and looked like he hadn’t left the house in days.

  “Do the police have any leads?” Caz asked, swishing across the lobby and into a vast kitchen done out in Edwardian country Lady style.

  I looked around, half expecting a scullery maid with rickets and consumption to shuffle forward with a bucket of coal and a pithy comment about that Mr Lloyd George.

  “Well you’d know more than I,” Morgan addressed me flatly. “I mean, didn’t you spend the night under arrest?”

  In the corner, a radio played quietly. On the vast oaken table – larger than my mother’s entire kitchen – sat a cafetiere, an overflowing ashtray and a single mug.

  Even more interesting, I thought.

  “Assisting,” Caz clarified. “Danny was never actually arrested; it’s just that, as landlord, he had to help the police get everything straight, about who was where and how things happened, isn’t that right, Danny?”

  “So it had nothing to do with the fact that the last thing he said to me before he went up to Lyra was that he was going to strangle her?” Foster, as though on auto pilot, had crossed to the Belfast sink and was filling a kettle from the tap.

  He’d been blunt with me, so I saw no reason to pussy foot around with him, “Why did you let Lyra play the Marq?”

  He busied himself putting the kettle on. “Because Caroline asked her to.”

  “No,” I shook my head, crossing to the sink and tapped the single used mug sitting on the draining board. “She did it because you sold it to her. So why would you have sold her an appearance at the Marq?”

  Foster sighed, his shoulders slumping as he crossed the room to the fridge and extracted a carton of milk.

  “I was married to Lyra twice; did you know that? Once from ‘79 to ‘84. She could be a cold heartless, selfish cow at times. But I married her again – six years ago. Underneath the shiny polished shell of studied disdain was a scared little girl and I wanted to protect that.”

  He wasn’t answering the question, but I let him carry on as the kettle came to the boil; left alone, he might come out with something useful to me.

  “Did you know my wife, Danny? Lyra Day didn’t exist – couldn’t exist – like mos
t normal people. Because Lyra Day wasn’t a real person. She was something that Eliza Chapel created.”

  “Eliza was my wife. Twice. But I never once called her anything other than Lyra. Not once. Because, even by the time I met her, Eliza had managed to convince herself and the rest of the world that she was Lyra Day. Because the alternative – being Eliza Chapel – was too much for her to take. So she killed Eliza and created Lyra. Except, of course, Lyra only existed for one thing: to be a star.”

  He poured the water into the mugs, flipped the teabags into the sink and added milk to all three mugs.

  “So why the Marq?” I prompted.

  “Because Lyra was dying again. After the scandal last year–”

  “Any idea what prompted the breakdown?” Caz interjected.

  “She thought I was having an affair,” Morgan sighed. “Lyra could have as many of those as she wished and – as you know if you’ve read the Sunday papers – did. But the thought that I might want someone else made her crazy.”

  “Were you?” I pressed.

  He avoided the question. “All Lyra saw was her own pain. She started hitting the drugs hard again and the result was the meltdown, the scandals in the papers, the end of her career and, ultimately, the Marq.”

  “Were there other offers?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She couldn’t get arrested. I wanted this to be the relaunch of Lyra Day, full stop. The fight had gone out of her. She’d slid into depression; didn’t leave the house, wouldn’t let me out of her sight, was becoming obsessive about only letting me, Jenny and Liz into the house. Then Jenny brought Dom around and he mentioned the idea of doing a biography and just talking about herself brought the sparkle back.”

  “When Jenny mentioned that Caz had asked if Lyra would do an appearance, I dismissed it immediately. Then I watched her one day, with Dominic, his Dictaphone on the side and she was Lyra again. Because she had an audience. And that’s your answer, Danny. It was an audience and I just knew that – despite the fact that she’d whine and bitch about the place – once she stood in front of a room full of people shouting her name, Lyra would be back.”